WITH HEAD STUCK INTO SAND

AIM, Belgrade, June 12, 1995

Croat "blitzkrieg" in Western Slavonia was retaliated
in Serbia by burning the sacristy and demolishing the parish
Church of St. Clement in Hrtkovci. "Overheated" Serbs in
village Vasica near Sid, levelled the Catholic church to the
ground. In Kukujevci, approximately at the same time, a bust
of the Catholic priest Petar Manic disappeared. In accordance
with the already recognizable model of reacting, the police
stated that the perpetrators are unknown, that an
investigation started... On St. George's day, also unknown
perpetrators from the village of Mali Bac demolished one of
the concrete crosses which stand by the road. Is this a
beginning on a new cycle which started in 1991 in Novi
Slankamen, and then continued in Hrtkovci, Kukujevci, Sid,
Ruma, Morovic?

Although noone around here can predict with certainty
what will happen the next day, there will probably be no new
wave of violence against Yugoslav citizens of Croat
nationality. Nationalistic euphoria has died down, and the
news about combats in Croatia are not carried in the first
minutes of the central state tv daily news program. News about
Western Slavonia are now pushed aside to the margins of the
program.

Srem without Croats

"It is evident that what is happening in Croatia
reflects on developments here, it is like a system of
connected vessels, the extremists are 'let loose'.
Nevertheless, the reactions are of lower intensity now than
they used to be during the aggression against Croatia",
President of the Democratic Alliance of the Croats in
Vojvodina (DSHV), Bela Tonkovic says, but he very resolutely
rejects the thesis that tensions in relation to domestic
Croats eased thanks to stabilization of the frontlines in
Croatia.

- Tensions are alleviated simply because villages with
majority Croat population have disappeared. There isn't a
single village in Srem with majority Croat population any
more. This is a true illustration of Milosevic's policy -
Tonkovic stresses.

The number of Croats who have, by their own free will
or by force, left the territory of present Yugoslavia cannot
be determined easily. Belgrade Archbishop, Mr France Perko,
stated in September last year that "after considerable
emigration which lasted for several years, emigration of Roman
Catholics has almost been interrupted." According to his
statement, towards the end of 1993, 8,200 Catholic believers
lived in Belgrade Bishopric. At the 1991 census, 16,400
citizens of Belgrade declared themselves to be of Croat
nationality.

"When I took over the Bishopric in 1987, it had 34
thousand believers", Mr Perko said, adding that "there are no
incidents lately, but an anti-Catholic and anti-Vatican
atmosphere which affects the believers and which speeded their
emigration does exist".

Based on an investigation carried out on site, the
Humanitarian Law Fund from Belgrade assessed that in mass
emigrations in the course of June, July, and August 1992, more
than 10 thousand Vojvodina Croats exchanged their property for
the property of Serbs from Croatia, and that altogether about
20 thousand of Croats left Vojvodina.

Bela Tonkovic claims, however, that very precise data
about the number of emigrants do exist, because they are all
gathered in the Association of refugees and banned Croats in
Croatia which has 40 thousand members.

- They are mostly people from Srem. There are some
from Backa, but many of them are from Belgrade too. It is
assessed that about 10 thousand have left from Belgrade alone
- Tonkovic claims.

Tonkovic also denies reliability of data of the last
census (1991) about the number of Croats who lived in the
territory of Serbia and Montenegro. According to official
data, about 100 thousand declared themselves to be Croats by
nationality.

- According to the 1991 census, about 80 thousand
Croats from Vojvodina dared declare themselves as Croats. We
must be aware that in spring that same year, a specific war
was waged in the media against Croatia, in preparation of the
military aggression. At the time, to declare oneself as a
Croat was true heroism - Tonkovic says.

He gives data of the Catholic Church as the most
authentic. And according to these data of the Church, about
250 thousand Croats lived on the territory of present
Yugoslavia in spring 1991. Out of that number, most of them
lived in Vojvodina - 160,000, then in Belgrade - about 40,000,
in Montenegro - up to 2,000, and in Kosovo - about 15,000.

To go or to stay

It is not difficult to imagine how those who were
forced to leave their homes in this war feel. Those who
remained to be the minority in "someone elses's" national
state must feel equally bad. How do those Croats live who have
remained in Yugoslavia, in the state which has "never waged
war" against their parent country?

There are differences between regions, but it is
probably the worst for those who live in Kosovo, where both
poverty and ethnic intolerance pressure them. The most
impressive example is village of Letnica. A group of Croats,
inhabitants of this village in the municipality of Vitina on
the Serbian-Macedonian border, appealed to the Humanitarian
Law Fund not long ago. In 1991, about four thousand citizens
of Croat nationality lived in this local community which
consists of four Croat villages, and their number is nowadays
reduced to 800.

Certain Marko Stojanovic, junior sergeant (as they
said in their conversation with the asociates of the Fund)
often arrests them, holds them in custody and mistreats them.
A melancholy statement of one of the inhabitants describes
their troubles best: "We were grieved most by the fact that
Marko drove away the cows and the donkeys to the slaughter
house in Gracanica. Those were the cows which gave milk for a
family of 22 members. People are poor around here." Military
patrols often take away the merchandise that they take to the
marketplace, the tractors they transport the merchandise in,
firewood they cut and carry for fuel. The soldiers park
military vehicles in the yard of the Saint Vlaho nunnery, and
it has become customary to dig trenches around the tilled land
around the village.

It is similar in villages of Janjevo and Vrnavokolo,
the other two local communities formed of several hamlets
where Kosovo Croats live. Croats from Janjevo who emigrated to
Slavonia in great numbers in the beginning of the war, leaving
behind rich houses, are allegedly now seeking the possibility
to return to their estates. In the course of last year, data
about a hundred families who wished to return appeared in
Belgrade media, and it was stated that they would demand
guarantees from Serb authorities. They are waiting for those
who have remained to send them news about the situation,
whether it has become peaceful and stable, because they say
that both the Serbs and the Albanians exert pressure on them
there. The inhabitants of Janjevo who have remained claim that
electric power supply is arbitrarily cut off in Croat
villages, that they are not allowed to use the wells which
were dug with the assistance of the Republic of Croatia in
Kosovo, and that they have difficulties even when they send or
receive their mail.

Inhabitants of the northern regions of the country, in
Srem practically have no such problems. In Srem villages, "an
idyllic peace" prevails, because their "blood count" has been
changed. Kukujevci, for instance, were a purely Croat village
before the war (with 97 per cent of the Croat population), and
now it is inhabited mostly by the Serbs who emigrated from
Croatia. It is assessed that about 80 per cent of the original
population left.

Belgrade mostly treated its Croat citizens with
tolerance. Mostly, because there was a certain amount of
pressure here too, especially in the beginning of the war,
when the regime television telecast disfigured corpses rousing
revanchism and "patriotism" among the Serbs. There were cases
of discharging from work which could never be proved to be on
ethnic grounds, but it was more or less clearly indicated to
them.

The case of eviction of Mrs. Ankica Glusac, a Croat,
which occurred in the beginning of the year, ended, if one may
say so, favourably. Mrs. Ankica Glusac was evicted from her
apartment in New Belgrade, but the mayor of Belgrade, Nebojsa
Covic, stepped in and, in the name of the city, allocated
another apartment to Mrs. Glusac. Last month, a similar case
of eviction happened to Catholic nuns who were evicted from
one of the apartmets they used. The case has a complicated
legal background, and since no pressure has been exerted by
the public which existed when Mrs. Ankica Glusac was evicted,
it is dubious what will happen with the demands to have their
apartment returned to them.

Neither a nation, nor a minority

Discrimination against the Croats when speaking of
state administration was most obvious in the case of the Army
of Yugoslavia. Cleansing of the Army of all non-Serbs was
completed by the end of 1993, when all persons in service of
the the Army of Yugoslavia who did not have the citizenship of
Yugoslavia were ordered to provide it in six-months' time. The
procedure for acquiring the citizenship lasted much longer,
and in a large number of cases, the applications were not even
answered. Bela Tonkovic claims that the judiciary was cleansed
in the similar manner, and that some top-level judges, with
long experience and impeccable careers remained without their
jobs, while their posts were taken by people "on whose judge's
exam certificates, ink has not dried yet".

The attitude of the media towards local Croats is a
separate issue, but one could say that the euphoria of
searching for spirits of the past (counting of victims and
searching for "those whose grandfathers were Ustashe") has to
a considerable extent died down. The "patriotic" press has
lately written about newly founded nations, (actually Croats
from Backa and Srem) who allegedly are not Croats at all, but
were forced to declare themselves as Croats by the Communist
Party after the Second World War. Thanks to the efforts of the
Serb authorities, this "injustice" is now put right, so that
these two groups will be enabled to acquire all rights of
national minorities. The President of DSHV calls this "the
next step in systematic destroying of the Croats in the FRY".

It is interesting that both representatives of the
Office of the Government of the Republic of Croatia in
Belgrade, and representatives of Yugoslav authorities refused
to talk about the citizens of Serbia of Croat nationality.

Mr Ivo Kujundzic, counsellor for humanitarian affairs
of the Croat Office, at first accepted to talk, demanding to
have the questions sent to him in writing in advance, because
"times were inconvenient". The answers never arrived, but just
an apology that everything had to be postponed for some other
time, because he had to leave on a business trip.

Yugoslav lady Minister for protection of national
minorities and human rights, Mrs. Margit Savovic, was also too
busy to talk about this issue, because she had nothing to add
to what she had already said about it. Namely, she declared,
in mid 1994 in Sombor, that Croats in Yugoslavia were not even
a minority, least of all a nation. in August 1993, during a
visit to Hrtkovci (out of which at least 450 Croat and
ethnically mixed families had emigrated), the lady Minister
also said: "Hrtkovci were visited by many so-called defenders
of human and minority rights and the village has become a
symbol of alleged invented ethnic cleansing". Or the
following: "There is no such thing as devastation of the
village and ethnic cleansing, but just certain individual
cases."

It appears as if everyone in Serbia is trying to avoid
this unpleasant topic. The reason for such behavior might have
been revealed by Ivo Viskovic, professor of the Faculty of
Political sciences, in his speech at the International
Conference about minorities.

"Although it has never been publicly said by anyone,
it can be concluded that the issue of defining the status of
the Muslims and the Croats in Serbia (it is similar in
Montenegro) is intentionally postoned and that so far it has
been neither formally, legally, nor actually determined. The
trend applied so far in final political and legal
confrontation of these issues was most probably the result of
a wish not to complicate further the complex situation in our
country and in this sense it can even be understood to a
certain degree", Professor Viskovic says.

He warns, however, that application of the tactics
"stick your head in the sand" for a long time might create
additional tensions and lead to pressures on the international
level - in relations with Croatia and B&H, but in relations
with certain institutions of the international community as
well.